Robin Good: Good article by Rex Hammock on RexBlog.com highlighting the confusion arising from using the term curation when it is not really appropriate.

He writes: "Somewhere along the way, the inherently-confusing metaphor of curation being applied to content on the web went from something like, finding relevant content and pointing readers to it to something like, find content on other sites and simply re-write what they say and place it on our site and that’s okay, as long as somewhere you credit the source.”

He has several more interesting points. here a few key excerpts from it: "While I believe “curation media” can be a helpful service to readers, the act of writing a story that rehashes another story — without adding some insight or background — is a disservice to all involved.

...

"...I’m not suggesting that the act of sharing articles you run across is anything but good. I’m not even suggesting that websites like Huffington Post or Business Insider are nothing more than re-writing services. (I’m not “suggesting” it, as it’s well known.)

This is the bottom line: To be of any value (or to prevent you from appearing foolish), your curation needs to be more than merely re-writing something that has already been re-written one or two times.

Are you asking the following questions: “What is social media curation?” and “How does it add value?” Are you like many business owners trying to get your head around curation and the associated benefits? Well I have come to realize, you are not alone!

In an earlier post I defined curation. In this post I would like us to revisit that definition and share how value can be gained by demonstrating how to use Scoop.it.

Hi students (and visitors). If you are having trouble with your profile photo changing every time that you post a new scoop, you can fix it by following these directions that a representative from Scoop.it sent me:
Indeed there's a setting to avoid that. Tell your students that on their Curate page, click on Manage>Customizations>untick "Last Post Image" box and click on Save.

This article succintly summarizes the value of curation for Not for Profit organizations. I believe the key messages in the article are transferable to all sectors.

Its opening shares thaa a curator needs to have superb social media monitoring and listening skills.

The author then share the three key benefit of curation within an organization:

1. Improve staff expertise.

2. Improve thought leadership

3. New sources of content. "It’s about curation, creativity and coordination across channels. Your content strategy is essential to the success of an integrated social media strategy. And content curation can help increase the shelf-life of your content you’re already producing."

The author goes on to suggest the importance of managng one's time. The following techiques should be considered:

1.Manage your attention

2.Visulize on paper

3.Establish rituals/ habits

4.Reflection

5.Manage email and other disctrtions

6.Make your phyiscial space

7.Take a break

Curation is an investment of time and effort as on seek the key points and value of what the social web has to offer:

This article succintly summarizes the value of curation for Not for Profit organizations. I believe the key messages in the article are transferable to all sectors.

Its opening shares thaa a curator needs to have superb social media monitoring and listening skills.

The author then share the three key benefit of curation within an organization:

1. Improve staff expertise.

2. Improve thought leadership

3. New sources of content. "It’s about curation, creativity and coordination across channels. Your content strategy is essential to the success of an integrated social media strategy. And content curation can help increase the shelf-life of your content you’re already producing."

The author goes on to suggest the importance of managng one's time. The following techiques should be considered:

Manage your attentionVisulize on paperEstablish rituals/ habitsReflectionManage email and other disctrtionsMane your phyiscial spaceTake a breakCuration is an investment of time and effort as on seek the key points and value of what the social web has to offer: 7/10Curated by Shirley Williams

This post was curated by Robin Good - I changed the title because I think it captures the message for all of us who post or curate anything for our audiences and for ourselves.

Robin Good: If you are interested in understanding how "content curation" differentiates itself from simple re-sharing and re-blogging here is a great article by Chris DeLine.

Great advice for anyone wanting to become an effective content curator: “Whether in tweets, in blog posts, in podcasts, or in newsletters, be ruthless with your attention.

...

Some adopt a strategy of blanket-curation, throwing everything new or fresh or remotely interesting online and letting other consumers make their own value distinctions.

Others assume the role of tastemaker, selectively making the decisions themselves.

Both have their place, but the former contributes to what Jonathan Haidt calls “the paradox of abundance,” which he says “undermines the quality of our engagement.”

How many content-overload websites can you monitor before you become overwhelmed by volume? How many share-explosions does it take before you remove a friend from your Facebook feed? How many Tumblr pages can you pay attention to before the reblogs become a blur?

...

Thoughtful, honest, and caring curation isn’t entirely different than creation.

After all, the topics you choose to research, to blog about, and to discuss with friends all begin with the process of sifting through the media abyss yourself and singling out worthwhile information."

What really counts is to create content that is useful, meaningful and helpful for others, whether from direct hand authorship, or by curating the best existing resources.

Robin Good: If you are writing or preparing to complete your first ebook, you have certainly been wondering what would be the best pricing strategy adopt, as the alternatives and options only seem to abund.

Catherine Howard writes on her blog: "How much should I charge for my book? is one of the biggest questions facing the soon-to-be-self-published author.

But I think self-published authors a year, two or three years in should also be asking themselves how much should I be charging for my books now?

The answer is as much as you can, i.e. the highest price at which your books continue to sell consistently well.

Lower than that, and you’re doing yourself—and possibly your work—a disservice. You might also be sending out subconscious messages about your book that are turning off prospective readers.

Higher than that, and your sales might slow to a trickle. Yes, it’s nice to earn seven or eight dollars off each sale (!!), but not if you’re only making two or three sales a month.

So how do we decide how much to charge for our e-books?"

To find out read the full story of how she went about it and what she learned from it.

Lets talk about the content in social media. There are so many debates on whether content is king; Or it is distribution? Or is it context? Why are we investing so much energy deciding the royalty status? Really? What is a given, is that content needs to be good and without it your may as well pack up shop. So lets go beyond the royalty status in this blog and discuss what content drives business value in this social environment we are living in today.

Robin Good: SeeSaw is a new web app which allows you to easily monitor social media news streams on any topic and in real-time.

You can pick and select which news stories to find by using hashtags, or specific search keywords. Once Seesaw starts visualizing the live social stream on that topic you can begin to save, pull together into collections and/or share them on your social media channels.

Each search you make can be saved and labelled and reloaded and updated in real-time with one click.

Very useful for monitoring specific topics and finding relevant stories to collect, share or post.

Did you know there is a lot of work that has to happen before one begins creating a content marketing strategy? There is and I am going to give you some strategies that will help you begin and also explain some important “non-negotiables”, as I call them.

First, Create a Team

Your business will need at the least a team of two people. This is especially true when your are writing/rewriting the content for the main pages of a website. They need to work together to create the content you need. There should be brainstorming and as they say, two brains are better than one. Seriously, this task is a two person job at a minimum.

There is Work to Be Done Before Your Team Begins:

There are no short cuts for effective and organized content marketing. The non-negotiables below have to be completed before writing begins. They apply to the writing of main content pages of a website and all other forms of content marketing.

During the past six months there have been some major changes in the way audiences consume information. These changes are happening simultaneously on two fronts, one in the form of content curation and the other in content shifting.

While content curation is nothing new, the rise in the use of mobile devices is changing when, where, and how we read internet content.

Content shifting:

Mobile devices are allowing people to break free from the computer desk and shift both the physical environment and the time in which they read or consume content.

This content shifting can be as simple as using tools like Evernote’s Clearly on a web browser.

Apps such as Pocket and Instapaper allow us to save articles discovered on a desktop computer to read later on any internet-connected device.

Sifting through the glut of information:

Many social media platforms have taken on the role of content curators, developing algorithms in an attempt to help us weed out the information we don’t want and present us with the information we do. This has been evidenced through a variety of changes in the Facebook Timeline, the #Discover tab on Twitter, and social search results in Google.

The latest wave of content shifting applications also curate and reformat articles to gear them toward our personal interests, fundamentally changing the reading experience as they do so. Programs such as Flipboard and Zite gather content from RSS feeds, Twitter, and Facebook streams and present it in a mobile-friendly magazine format.

Tips to optimize for content shifting and content curation:

1. Incorporate calls to action directly into the text...

2. Optimize for mobile...

3. Capitalize on compelling images...

4. Write strong headlines, lead paragraphs, and meta descriptions...

5. Maximize social media sharing...

6. Publish and promote quality content...

Each element and tip is analyzed with more information. Read full article here: http://j.mp/LmZpjT

The author of this article is huge fan of the Online Journalism Review and after reading one of the latest blog posts"Five more lessons for getting it right, this time around" ( http://bit.ly/vg45DU ;), she thought to start a healthy debate and perspective on Niles’ assertion, “Don’t make the syndication mistake.”

While she agrees that licensed content should not replace original content creation, the syndication market has rapidly evolved over the past 5 years, creating a new architecture for news and media and providing huge opportunities for publishers and content buyers.

In this full interesting article, I excerped this part and it is the title of my curated article:

"Niles (the author of post on OJR) focuses on traditional publishers in the article, but licensing syndicated content is also a great opportunity for brands. For example, imagine you’re the content marketing strategist for a major fashion retailer. Your entire job is dedicated to building, articulating and spreading your brand’s view on fashion trends through your blog and content marketing efforts.

Creating high quality, original content takes a lot of work and time, as it rightfully should. However, imagine that you have the opportunity to license and streamline a huge range of voices and perspectives into your content marketing strategy – from bloggers such as The Sartorialist to the Fashion Toast, magazine publications like Inventory and Elle, major fashion sites like Style.com or The Cut.

Curating a variety of relevant, niche perspectives not only supports the evolving definition of today’s “journalist,” but also helps to build your own unique voice, better engage your audience and increase the likelihood of people staying engaged and on your site...."

Content has always been king, but more recently content marketing has started to get more of the attention it deserves in organizations with budget allocated to creating content. These 10 strategies will help you to start creating great content.

Excerpted from article by Pawan Deshpande, CEO at Curata:"By definition, content curation is the act of continually identifying, organizing, and sharing the best and most relevant content on a specific topic or issue online. When evaluating which content curation tool to use, there are three primary areas of consideration:

1.The Inputs – Where does the content curation tool get information from? What type of content will this allow me to curate? Will it help identify and recommend relevant content?

2.The Organization – What does this tool offer in terms of organizing content once it has been identified? What type of data models does this represent content as? In a simple chronological list, or an inter-linked structure? Does it let me annotate and editorialize the curated content?

3.The Venue – How and where can I share the content once I have decided to curate it?

In this blog post, I am primarily going to focus on the decided on a content curation tool based on the venue – the channels to which your content is curated.

- Embedded Widget.What is it? Embedded widgets allow you to display curated content in a small pane on your existing web properties.Pro’s: Relatively easy to implement with Javascript code or create an iframe.Con’s: Content in widgets is almost never indexed by search engines because they are rendered in Javascript which search engines do not consider.Who should use it? Organizations that are looking primarily to touch up their website with some fresh content may want to use a widget.

- Microsite.What is it? A dedicated microsite or section of a website populated primarily with curated content.Pro’s: Microsites really create a full-fledged experience with curated content as the center piece and can easily because the hub for a specific topic or issue.Con’s: Because the curated content is not tucked away in a widget and is instead front and center, you will need to pay a lot more attention to what you curate.Who should use it? Organizations that are looking to become an authoritative destination for a topic or issue to position themselves as a key resource or thought leader, or to drive traffic and visibility.

- Personalized Page.What is it? A personalized page is a lightweight, single page microsite filled with curated content.Pro’s: Easy to get up and running and are indexed by search engines. Usually free.Con’s: Only one page is indexed by search engines.Who should use it? Individuals or cost conscious non-profits who want to create an information resource.

- Email Newsletters.What is it? An email newsletter or digest containing the latest curated content that is sent out on a regular interval. Pro’s: Email newsletters are a great way to continually educate an audience on a regular basis without fail.Con’s: Email newsletters have two drawbacks: 1. They are not indexed by search engines. 2. They are not real time. Who should use it? Email newsletters are a great medium for curated content for curators with an existing captive audience.

- Twitter & Social Media Channels.What is it? Posting curated content on Twitter and other social media channels such as Facebook and LinkedIn through status updates. The curated content could be links to blog articles or other web content, or curated tweets.Pro’s: Posting curated content is different from other mediums, because it’s a very time sensitive medium. Con’s: The drawback of sharing curated content on social media is that if you don’t have a lot of curated content on your topic, then it’s hard to get noticed. Because social media is content is so fleeting, if you are not constantly and consistently posting your curated content, then your impact will be minimal. Who should use it? Curators who have topics with a sufficient throughput of content. Curators with an existing or potential audience on social media channels. Curators with content that has a likelihood of being shared virally.

- Feeds.What is it? Content that’s shared through RSS feeds or other data feeds.Pro’s: People with RSS readers can subscribe to them – who are usually visitors who return regularly. In addition, some search engines crawl RSS feeds.Con’s: Social media these days has in many ways taken the place of RSS feeds and provide more room for annotation. Unlike social media, it’s also difficult to annotate your content as a curator and add your own context. Who should use it? Curators with an audience that prefers this medium.

So what’s the right answer? Which venue should you choose as you evaluate content curation tools?A sound content curation strategy utilizes all of the venues and channels, but drives all visitors back to a single microsite. If you’re using a robust content curation platform then you should be able to easily syndicate your content to all channels with ease..."

well, it is a pity that two skilled professionals do not know to how to do converge assertively their differences, and result in better contents, and content curation. Both of you are partly right and partly wrong, under my point of view, and instead of focusing in your differences, why don´t you focus on what may bring you together?

@pawan @giuseppe I appreciate your work, both. We should value the mere fact that you and we are able to share diverging point of views on an open Platform like Scoop.it. That is true Social Content Curation, isn't it?

Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano has an interesting and highly visual post on collecting vs. curating with Twitter, and on the curation potential Twitter has in store for those involved in education.

She quotes Mike Fisher writing: "Collecting is what kids do when asked to find resources for a particular topic. Usually, it represents the first 3 or 4 hits on a Google search, without meaning, discernment, or connections.

Curating is different. It’s the Critical Thinker’s collection, and involves several nuances (see Figure 1) that separate it as an independent and classroom-worthy task."

Robin's curated posts hits it on the nail with the distinct differences and although I like the visual aspects of the post, I struggle with referring to Twitter as a curating tool.

It is certainly a critical tool for collecting, researching and having the conversations. I think there is a challenge on how to effectively curate with Twitter. I know many use Storify to do this which is often a re- representationof the tweets.

I am very interested in how Twitter will use Summnify aand Posterous in the field of curation.

As a result, I really likw the distinctions made and the logic the author takes us through. I would perhaps be a little more cautious with referring Twitter as a curation tool.

Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano has an interesting and highly visual post on collecting vs. curating with Twitter, and on the curation potential Twitter has in store for those involved in education.

She quotes Mike Fisher writing: "Collecting is what kids do when asked to find resources for a particular topic. Usually, it represents the first 3 or 4 hits on a Google search, without meaning, discernment, or connections.

Curating is different. It’s the Critical Thinker’s collection, and involves several nuances (see Figure 1) that separate it as an independent and classroom-worthy task."

Robin's curated posts hits it on the nail with the distinct differences and although I like the visual aspects of the post, I struggle with referring to Twitter as a curating tool.

It is certainly a critical tool for collecting, researching and having the conversations. I think there is a challenge on how to effectively curate with Twitter. I know many use Storify to do this which is often a re- representationof the tweets.

I am very interested in how Twitter will use Summnify aand Posterous in the field of curation.

As a result, I really likw the distinctions made and the logic the author takes us through. I would perhaps be a little more cautious with referring Twitter as a curation tool.

Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano has an interesting and highly visual post on collecting vs. curating with Twitter, and on the curation potential Twitter has in store for those involved in education.

She quotes Mike Fisher writing: "Collecting is what kids do when asked to find resources for a particular topic. Usually, it represents the first 3 or 4 hits on a Google search, without meaning, discernment, or connections.

Curating is different. It’s the Critical Thinker’s collection, and involves several nuances (see Figure 1) that separate it as an independent and classroom-worthy task."

Content curation will play a major role both in the way we teach and in the way we educate ourselves on any topic. When and where it will be adopted, it will deeply affect many key aspects of the educational ecosystem.

Therese Torris suggested me this her interesting and long article. Excerpted from it:

"Content curation help brands increase their visibility and their customer engagment.

- Content curation does help content discovery.

- Social content curation fosters customer engagement.

- Corporate curation tools help create a competitive advantage.

- But content curation is no panacea for failing content creation.

Most of us do “curate” content in that we collect, filter, edit, and re-dispatch online information related to the topics that are relevant to our friends and followers. We want to become the go-to person for our target audience on the topic we curate.

Content curation is much more than content aggregation. A brand curator handpicks the content that matches the interests of his target audience: He/she filters it to keep only the best. He/she also possibly edits and comments it, before posting the curated result on multiple media.

The emphasis is on “partly”: curation tools assist curators, they don’t do away with them as people able to make intelligent judgments about which content adds value to which topic and its audience.

***Content Curation Delivers Visibility and Engagement

a) visibility:

By organizing their content around topics shared with their audience, brands active on social curation sittes increase their chances to be discovered in a relevant context.

b) engagement:

Content curation does not only bring visibility, it also fosters customer engagement by adding external quality content that adds:

Robin Good: I agree. Curation is an autonomous process of collective intelligence, where you and me, and all the others who sift and select from the ocean of information passing through them, unconsciouly help our global brain, to make sense of the information we have ourselves created.

Even those who simply like, share or retweet, contribute to this process, by gradually filtering and marking what is most interesting and relevant to them.

Evolver.fm writes on Wired: "There’s too much stuff. We can help each other find it. This is what the age of curation is about.

Yes, it’s amusing to make fun of people who seem to retweet other people’s links all day, but that’s giving all of those retweeters and Likers too little credit by far.

What they’re really doing is strengthening connections in the global brain, in much the same way the axons and dendrites in our brain grow and lose connections to shape our minds."

This sounds like a bunch of hippie drivel, but we really are creating a global brain, of sorts, by encoding human knowledge and tracking human activity.

Using the human nodes of this network to strengthen some of these connections while weakening others (by choosing either to pass along i.e., ‘curate’ information or not to pass it along) helps this global brain function better as a system, which in turn increases its power whenever any of us need to tap into it.

...

When we curate, for whatever reason and in whatever form, we are enhancing a connection in the global neural network we are inadvertently creating."

"Services like Scoop.it depend on a community of millions of hardworking experts who wonder what to do with the wealth of knowledge and wisdom they have accumulated in life and are happy to share it."

Written by blogger Shred Pillai on the Huffington Post, this vibrant praise of Social Curation in general and Scoop.it in particular, points out the changes we're seeing in the way we look for information. From basic search, we now look more and more for meaning and context from human experts.

Beyond information, we want knowledge.

And this is what Curation is all about.

As he concludes: "At the end of the day, Scoop.it, which is free, is the right answer for information seekers and providers as well as the experts who like to show off their expertise."

Robin Good: Good article by Rex Hammock on RexBlog.com highlighting the confusion arising from using the term curation when it is not really appropriate.

He writes: "Somewhere along the way, the inherently-confusing metaphor of curation being applied to content on the web went from something like, finding relevant content and pointing readers to it to something like, find content on other sites and simply re-write what they say and place it on our site and that’s okay, as long as somewhere you credit the source.”

He has several more interesting points. here a few key excerpts from it: "While I believe “curation media” can be a helpful service to readers, the act of writing a story that rehashes another story — without adding some insight or background — is a disservice to all involved.

...

"...I’m not suggesting that the act of sharing articles you run across is anything but good. I’m not even suggesting that websites like Huffington Post or Business Insider are nothing more than re-writing services. (I’m not “suggesting” it, as it’s well known.)

This is the bottom line: To be of any value (or to prevent you from appearing foolish), your curation needs to be more than merely re-writing something that has already been re-written one or two times.

After the the social media strategy has been debated, discussed and finalized, what’s next? Well, one important tactic or plan is your content. What information will you share with your network? How will this information support your strategy, goals and quite frankly how will it take you to where you want to be?

This episode will touch on the subject of content marketing and curation. We will discuss content marketing concepts; how to share content that will deliver value to your customers and your business. We will discuss how both original content and curated content can lead to business gain.

I am so pleased to have as my guests Marcus Sheridan, The Sales Lion and Karen Dietz, Just Story It, to have this discussion. Both are strong leaders and practitioners in this field.

Karen Dietz has also been featured in the Scoop.it Lord Curation Series. Join us on Thursday June 21st 8pm on my Social Media Pearls iRadio show.

Robin Good: The Institute for the Future and the University of Phoenix have teamed up to produce, this past spring, an interesting report entitled Future Work Skills 2020.

By looking at the set of emerging skills that this research identifies as vital for future workers, I can't avoid but recognize the very skillset needed by any professional curator or newsmaster.

It should only come as a limited surprise to realize that in an information economy, the most valuable skills are those that can harness that primary resource, "information", in new, and immediately useful ways.

And being the nature of information like water, which can adapt and flow depending on context, the task of the curator is one of seeing beyond the water,

to the unique rare fish swimming through it.

The curator's key talent being the one of recognizing that depending on who you are fishing for, the kind of fish you and other curators could see within the same water pool, may be very different.

Here the skills that information-fishermen of the future will need the most:

1) Sense-making:

ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed

2) Social intelligence:

ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions

3) Novel and adaptive thinking:

proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based

4) Cross-cultural competency:

ability to operate in different cultural settings

5) Computational thinking:

ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning

6) New media literacy:

ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication

7) Transdisciplinarity:

literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines

8) Design mindset:

ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes

9) Cognitive load management:

ability to discriminate and filter information for importance, and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques

10) Virtual collaboration:

ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team

Thanks for sharing this from Robin's stream. These skills sets could form the basis of a self-assessment for would-be curators, although they're more conceptual - than practical/tactical. Thanks for sharing and must go rescoop it with a credit you and Robin of course

"Jon Miller of News Corp may have predicted 2012 will see the "channelisation" of the web, but he really means a renewed focus on curation..."

"Channelisation implies that media corporations such as News Corp will be the ones controlling the playlist of content, but 2012 will see the role of such organisations fall back to providing content for others to turn into a wealth of different “channels” where the barrier to entry essentially falls to zero."

Key highlights curated from the article:

Curation of niche interest: channelisation

"...opening up of video on demand services from all these channels will allow much smaller organisations to provide cross-channel curation.

If the channels who provide the content are still showing their ads before, during and after each show, then curators could start channels focusing on more specific interests and smaller niches than a broadcast channel could do – there will be channels dedicated to crime shows, medical shows, shows with appearances from certain actors, and more.

A user will just have to think of a single genre or idea that they want to watch in a show, and there will be a “channel” or that."

The curator"More interesting than the drive to smaller and smaller niches, which could, at least in part, be algorithmically generated – will be the focus on the curator.

If a user trusts the taste of a journalist, presenter, blogger or other figure – they may be more interested to watch the content that user picks than the content programmed for any particular channel.

...These curators could add to the content by providing commentary from their own knowledge of the content – offering a place where consumers could find a new love."

Social Curation"...Equally, groups of curators could join together to offer more regular programming than the one-off playlists of individuals, basically creating “channels” without any of the budget and monetary constraints of a real channel.

They would not have to pay for licensing as the content owners will bundle ads with the in-stream content, and so people will curate out of love and interest rather than having to focus on budgetary constraints."

This is great news! I feel like it's Christmas all over again - think of all the possibilities, especiaily the Social Curation where groups of curators get together to offer regular programming. This is my favorite part "so people will curate out of love and interest rather than having to focus on budgetary constraints." My head is spinning, so many ideas flooding my brain, I need to curate my thoughts:-)

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.